Theology Dear Watson

I have often wondered what Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes would have been like if the character had any sense of theology.

For as good as Sherlock was in deductive reasoning, it seems to me that he could have been all the more effective had he understood the human person.

Of course, there are some who believe the eccentric Mr. Holmes could not be both reasonable and religious, and this is true…

…But he could have been reasonable and Christian, a point proven over and over again by every Pope who has had a Ph.D.

There are others as well who believe that Sherlock plustheology is really just another way of saying Fr. Brown, the beloved creation and mystery solving priest of G.K. Chesterton.

But that is like saying that Fr. Brown is really just Sherlock Holmes minusJesus, or something equally strange.

No, no, no, the sociopathic, introverted Holmes loved a good case more than he did people, and I can only imagine that the introduction of something as real and vast as theology would have caused him to be equally neurotic about something else.

That being the case, the good detective would have had more data to go on when solving any number of urban mysteries.

And he certainly would not have been so obtuse when it came to relating to the people that should have mattered to him most.

Whatever his observational and crime solving skills may have been though, one thing is plain:

A theological Holmes would have been more annoying than Sir Doyle had written him.

Oh, I can see it now.

First the man deduces where you were last night based on a single string found on your jacket and mud stuck to your right boot, and then proceeds to tell you why you hesitated to go to confession out of a sense of scrupulosity and ignorance of some little known principle found in the writings of Duns Scotus.